N.Y.’s left-wing crackup: What comes next for the Working Families Party and Gov. Cuomo

The activist core of a small liberal state party has come to the conclusion that Gov. Cuomo — despite having hiked the minimum wage, won paid family leave, made public college free for most and slapped a moratorium on fracking — is too much of a triangulator.

It's the Working Families Party's right to make that judgment, but count us puzzled by the progressive bear-hug of unproven first-time candidate Cynthia Nixon. The choice is reshaping the left flank of New York's political scene, and not for the better: Progressive activism unmoored from pragmatism and fiscal sanity will not be good for this state.

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The Working Families Party was born back in 1998 as a coalition of grassroots organizations and labor unions dedicated to advancing economic fairness. It owes a good deal of its power, as all smaller New York parties do, to

odd state fusion voting laws that let candidates run on more than one party line in general elections.

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In 2010 and 2014, the WFP gave its endorsement to Cuomo — the second time only after activists, excited by insurgent Zephyr Teachout and dispirited by Cuomo's embrace of the state Senate's Independent Democratic Conference extracted a series of promises from the governor.

This time, with the left emboldened in the age of Trump, the same forces that pulled for Teachout threw their support to Nixon. Which was anathema to the party's more pragmatic union backers, loath to burn bridges with Cuomo — who twisted and almost broke arms to get them to pull out of the party.

Yes, the party has had done plenty good over the years, leading the way on the minimum wage and other causes Cuomo came to embrace. But the Nixon faction wails it's not enough, never enough, and demands a gallop even further to the left, now to legalize marijuana entirely and pour more dollars into schools , by raising taxes in our high-tax state ever higher.

Ironically, the WFP stuck its finger in Cuomo's eye just weeks after he coaxed the IDC to reunify with the mainline Senate Democrats, checking a big box for many progressives.

Which is to say, the Working Families Party has likely just grandstanded its way to irrelevance.

Meantime, Cuomo, in consolidating power, has racked up fresh debts with unions that already make big demands on state spending. Why else do subways cost $2.5 billion a mile to build? Why else do charter schools frequently get the short end of the stick? Why else is health-care spending often out of control?

Politically, Cuomo and the unions are now arm in arm. For the sake of sound public policy, they must not walk in lockstep.